Corporations in one way or another respond to the COVID-19 crisis. Amazon has been supporting their employees, customers and communities.
Let’s just take a look at some of the official data that Amazon has provided.
First of all, some main steps were approved for employees. Amazon offered over $500 million as Thank You bonus, invested approximately $4 billion on COVID-related initiatives to keeping employees safe, established a $25 million relief fund for parners (e.g. delivery drivers) and seasonal associates facing financial hardshipa and so on.
In addition to obvious actions for clients such as providing free masks to customers, cleaning at all Amazon physical stores, Amazon has made some interesting decisions. For instance Whole Foods Market stores have dedicated shoping hours to 60+, with disabilities and hihg risk customers. Amazon also combats price gouging to help protect customers, helps ensure fair pricing, and combats those seeking to profot off the COVID-19 crisis.
And finally, serious steps for society as a whole: $20 milliion AWS Diagnostic Initiative, $23 million to support those most affected by the pandemic in Europe, Amazon Founder donated $100 million to Feeding America, over 12,000 pupils got laptops.
And this is not a complete list of good deeds.
Of course, this is all part of the marketing strategy. This strategy may seem too expensive and it is effectiveness can not be evaluated soon However, a company that has managed to increase its market cap from 900B to 1.6T since start of pandemic can afford such “humane” strategy. Formation of loyalty to a brand / company / corporation is now the main task of any marketing division. An illustrative example is the publication on the official Amazon website dedicated to the new chief marketing officer. In addition to describing the achievements of the specialist, the following thought was formulated «She will help to develop an even stronger emotional connection with our audience». We believe that this cutted out of context phrase characterizes one of the main tasks of modern marketing. We formulated the task as follow: “Make the client your advocate”.